- Hi everybody.
Here we are in the indoor overwintering room at the Honey Bee Research Centre and I want
to explain a little bit about how we winter some of our colonies indoors.
What we move indoors are smaller colonies and sometimes we'll move colonies in that
are a little bit weaker, that we don't think would make it through outdoors.
So I'll describe the process and then we'll talk a bit about the kinds of colonies that
we've got in here.
We keep this room at five degrees celsius, all winter long or as close to that as our
equipment will allow.
And the bees are in total darkness for that time period.
If there were light in here, at five degrees, the bees would be crawling all over the place,
but in the dark they stay in their homes.
We use outside air to cool the room down to five.
Each one of these bee hives produces 15 watts of heat, so when you have say, have 100 hives
in a room like this, that's the equivalent of running a 1,500 watt electric heater.
So they do generate quite a bit of heat and we use the external air to cool the room down
to five degrees.
We've got over here, all the equipment that controls the devices.
We have a heating thermostat, we have a cooling thermostat, we have a time clock for the fan
and then we have a temperature alarm that would warn us if its getting too warm or too
cold in here, but being too warm is what we would be most concerned with.
If it gets too warm inside an indoor wintering room, the bees start generating more heat
and it can spiral out of control.
The room can heat up beyond the temperature the bees can tolerate and all the hives would
die.
So it's very important that we are able to keep that room cool.
So we set the temperature so that it stays at five degrees.
The outside air is brought in through a duct at the far end of the room here, up in the
corner there, so that duct is connected to a 10 inch, squirrel cage fan and that's sort
of the heart of the system here.
That will move about 2,000 cubic feet per minute of air into the room.
So it's really important to have large volume, the capacity to move large volumes of air
into the room to keep the room cool.
So it works kind of two ways.
We also need to provide ventilation so if there was no need to adjust the temperature
in the room, the same air would stay in the room and it would become stale.
So we have this time clock set up over here, to control the fan and that is set so that
once every hour, all the air in the room is purged and we have fresh air in the room.
When it's doing that, it pushes the air around in the room and that's the time clock that
you can see there.
So it not only pushes air out, but it circulates the air within the room.
CO2 and moisture build up in the room so we need to be able to expel that.
When that fan pressurizes the room, the only way for the air to get out of the room is
off the floor, through this duct down on the floor here.
There are four of these ducts in the room.
Air goes in at the bottom, gets forced up and out through the wall and these are all
light proof.
There's two elbows in there and the inside of the pipes are painted black so no light
can get in through that duct work there.
So that's basically the mechanics of the room.
The ventilation and the control of the heat.
Let's talk a little bit about what happens with the bee hives when we move them in.
These are full size colonies.
Full size, single bridge chamber colonies.
Over here we have four way, nucleus colonies.
So there are four little colonies in there.
That, I think, is probably too small for wintering in here.
We're just experimenting with that, but some of these we have divided into two.
We're working with Les Eccles with the Ontario Bee Keepers Association testing these out.
What we find works really well in here is over on this side and these are double nucleus
colonies right here.
So there's a partition down the middle, a hive here and a hive over there.
They cluster around the middle here so they function pretty much as a single bridge chamber
hive, but we find these double nucleus colonies winter over really well in here.
So those are the three different sizes that we're working with right now.
What we find with bees that are wintered indoors, is they consume much less food.
The average full size single or double nucleus colony only goes through about 11 pounds of
honey through the winter to get through the winter.
So when we move them out in the spring and we're moving them out tomorrow morning, April
the 6th, when we move those out, they still have lots of food to get through the spring
until the nectar starts coming in.
They don't have any brood because if it's dark in here, the queen doesn't lay any eggs,
so when they move out, they'll start working on getting some of the spring pollen and start
brooding up, but right now they have no brood in them at all.
We try to move them out on a cold morning, when the bees aren't flying and that we can
do it in the daytime then.
If we don't have that kind of condition, we would move them out at night, but tomorrow
mornings supposed to be nice and cold, so we'll get these girls out of here.
They haven't defecated since December 15th, so we move them out and stand back.
That's it, thanks for watching.
See ya next time.